Taking Flight

I sat down to double check when Kingmaker and Wrath start (4710 and 4715)
and ended up playing a whole day of Wrath of the Righteous
just trying to clear the Smile.

I am getting my butt kicked so hard. Over and over. It sucketh.
No one is making their saves against gibber or drone, including the guy in the headband that ought to make him immune. I have Iron Will and Improved and it is still not working. Unbreakable heart works fine but last seconds.

I have been back to camp twice to swap spells and personnel.

And tactics that worked just fine on Core are not working no more because we can't blooming hit things, like at all.

... the demons can't hit us neither, until they do and we are paste, but mostly we are standing there trading futility.

Lann needs his true strike before he hits things. Lann! I must have built him wrong this time.

Or, Hard is so hard.

... I am stubborn and likely to continue playing but it is not as much fun as when the difficulty is more balanced.

Today - the awake that started Sunday but had also finished earlier Sunday - I did a fair proportion of Sunday tasks, plus laundry and dishwasher, so I should feel pretty okay about my achievements.

Then today - the actual part since midnight - I think I got hold of a plot bunny that unstuck my story. The story is still too much a mess. But I think I have parts that can make it go.

Of course the parts make a tidier two person horror story connected only by the same building, but I am working on that. That part can happen and the other part can be the solve. Possibly.

I need better research sources, which is to say any that are not wiki or the google making things up. I need to think of better searches for the not google pages. I still like the feeling of the google telling you things you don't know you don't know but every single time it includes some obvious and very glaring falsehoods so what is the use of that? No use. But when I try and follow links from wiki it is all paywalls and websites that don't do things and academic books the library don't got that cost giant money and I can't tell from here how much is relevant. And I have no research patience lately, I just hare off after the next interesting bit.

I started the afternoon looking up Witchcraft Acts, Henry VIII and the Dissolution of the Monasteries. It's all fascinating but pretty soon you whoosh past a couple of centuries of horrible violence and it's ... there are many things that I could use for story parts but it seems to trivialise the problems they lived through. But if I find the right thread this is exactly the stuff that horror comics drew on that felt proper deep and resonant. Find the right connections and it is about fear and factions and social break down in ways one hopes would never be relevant.

I like the idea that Torchwood or the Forge or SHIELD or UNIT all encode a particular relation of power both within Britain and between nations, and then add aliens and magic. It's kind of like time travel via institution. The ideas that founded them set their agenda.

So other eras of British history would do something equally distinctive to the organisations they shape.
( Read more... )

And I know way too little about laws and politics to figure out how magic would layer into them.

But the magic is the vehicle for telling stories about relations of power so you are saying
What if Seperate religious laws in religious lands
What if families that buy the right land have power
What if just promising to never use power again and keeping it all in restricted books
What if working for the legal but unpopular boss
What if oaths were binding
What if service was compulsory
What if we trampled over the rights of our own people and then took that show global
... what can we learn about never doing it again?



What if I get some sleep before I have to get up again.
... the math is not on my side on that one.

But I keep finding out so many things I could usefully learn and such complicated systems where all the parts have to work right together always or Horrible Consequences and it is all fascinating
without being immediately useful.

Ah well.

I got like two hours sleep before I had to wake up for Cleaner Day so I have been noodling Pathfinder 1e as background for Pathfinder Earth 2026.
Because there are two options, and one goes wildly AU after 1918 when Golarion and all its gods knows about Earth. But the design philosophy of the 1918 adventure was that it was all true background for This Earth, just somehow only happening in the shadows and gaps.
Which makes no sense! If you have a planet of low level characters like this one then the entire predatory ecosystem of the outer planes becomes Very Interested. You have to get to here now without that ever making a Worldwound or a noticeable Cheliax.

You can get there via BtVS and Angel if you buy the whole 'not working despite us, working for us' framing Wolfram and Hart tried to sell. ... which is a specific kind of depressing.
And certainly Pathfinder Earth has the actual devil and his archdevil hierarchy playing here, because they play everywhere. But why not more openly? Why nothing that is not deniable?

It's all sneaky cold war stuff with different Powers acting around each other instead of openly against like they do in the Cage. Why?

one layer of answers says someone Lies Sleeping and they don't want to wake him up

but I am having fun with the idea that: it is paradox avoidance.
There is a specific future date that someone travelled back from (probably the Knight Commander of the Fifth Crusade because I play that game so many hours and because they are a soul plucked from the great beyond in a story with a god of paradox in the DLC)
until they reach that date the majority of the heavy hitters are actively trying to stay hidden (the god of paradox would obviously not, but the DLC has them in extra planar prison or dead again, so they are taking a time out)
after that date it is Open Season

I want to set up a magic school with end game gold to back it and change the Earth to be all post scarcity possibility

but

What are the other teams doing?

the answers i can come up with are
Everything I can think of but for different reasons

that's a lot of things.

And the world is in Pathfinder terms ignorant or disbelieving so vulnerable to like Legends of Tomorrow and the EYES app signing up for Some Things.

And I would want to use Pathfinder style magic to set up a Stargate style future where you can just go live on other planets because simples.
... but promising that with a different agenda ie dropping people into the abyssal breeding planes for mortal slaves? So Much More Simples. They don't have to do the complicated parts of finding viable homes and making them good to live in, because they don't want it to be good and they can drop you in their own back yards.

Mage the Ascension paradigm wars except it's a lot of demons trying to persuade you demons aren't real so they can do goa'uld shit on an Earth population scale.

And they have potentially been here more than a century setting this up! They wouldn't have to build from scratch, just go public!

... so this is a pretty plot heavy plot bunny but it gets difficult thinking up Counters for it. Telling the truth and offering a future made of hard work and freedom has to be made more appealing somehow...

Everything one high level adventurer could do let loose on Earth, all the factions of Golarion have had incentive to do for over a century, and the outer planes residents can get there to do it.

To look even vaguely Earth adjacent at that point takes *work*
but logically builds out a number of urban fantasy horror worlds from parts...

I started today idly wondering how far north I would have to move to get back to the weather I remember from thirty years ago (probably goth Whitby would work for a while), and then I ended up mildly frustrated once again at how John Constantine's house in Legends of Tomorrow isn't something you are likely to be able to place on a map in Britain.

Also someone is paying the council tax on that thing and that is going to be So Much Money.
So much.

I acknowledge it is cool and pointy and looks like the House of Mystery in the comics, but as someone who just read through over ten years of Hellblazer comics omnibus, I feel like this is just signs of how comics only refer to themselves now.

I am a grumpy, obviously.

The thing is though in those comics omnis John's income is precarious and intermittent, and when he gets chucked out of his flat because breakup he ends up homeless for a bit. Or before that when he went home and found some nasty murders he was a suspect for and took up with travellers and learned to bend a tent. His is a life with actions and consequences and occasionally being implied to be sleeping with someone primarily because it is warm with a solid chance of breakfast. That's a specific type of guy, right?

But then he isn't in Vertigo any more, he gets swept into the sliding timeline, Thatcher has ever less to do with his personal experience, and instead of a specific economic reality, he is whooshed off into suoerhero world. In superhero world people have a place to live because the story says so. Even going broke means they've only got their arrow cave to live in and a steady source of income so they don't have to quit their night job. The square footage stretches to television rules, and suddenly you have to wonder how rich Constantine is, if he ever converted it back to money. You can contrast the comics where he's forever scrounging, finding things to sell, trying to find somewhere that will take a bet, with even the half season of his own show, where he sends Chas out to make some bets once and now nobody in the show has to think about money ever again. Money ceases to be relevant, let alone a problem. They change his entire implied social class!

They erase the foundational difference between him and the non trenchcoat mages. They drag him out of his political framing. He ceases to be the same guy.

I mean from that perspective I actually like when they change the house into being a pocket dimension. A scooped out bit of hell to live in keeps things focused on the Deal, at least potentially, and not the bank balance. Which makes it really dodgy everyone else is so easy about using it.

A house with enough rooms for the Legends to stay in without sharing is a seriously swish house.

You go from a guy who grew up in a terraced house, to a guy with a mansion, and there is So Much Politics in just that decision.

But no, it looks cool, it looks like the House of Mystery, the story moves on.



Watching Torchwood I can see from the visual language of set dressing and what they out in the kitchen what kind of social background class background money a given character is meant to have. I can read those signs. I am aware I cannot translate the American version.

But this is more annoying, because everything communicates, but it doesn't make sense.




Okay, I should go have lunch. Also breakfast. At tea time.
... yes i am a grumpy indeed...